Richard Gephardt: “there is a great saying by a great person who once said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat…”

“there is a great saying by a great person who once said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' Republicans have failed to learn from our past experiences with the 1990 census, at the cost of leaving out millions of Americans in the year 2000 count. We are here today debating the Mollohan amendment simply because our Republican colleagues have forgotten about what happened in 1990, when the census failed to count over 6 million people in this country. Their collective amnesia will condemn us to repeat another failed census which disproportionately undercounts Hispanic and African Americans, children and rural residents. Republicans like to act like they have learned the lesson of past mistakes on the great civil rights issues of our generation, when many in their party were on the wrong side of efforts to extend voting rights and desegregate public places in our country. The census is today's great civil rights issue, and once again Republicans are standing against what is right and what will give us an accurate census. They are determined to ensure that the 2000 census has an even greater undercount by limiting funding to the Census Bureau in the Commerce-State-Justice appropriations bill to only six months.”